'Young
feller,' said he, after he had made a professional prophecy,' you'll
hear of that town if you live. She's born lucky.'
I saw the town later - it was a siding by a trestle bridge where Indians
sold beadwork - and as years passed I gathered that the old tramp's
prophecy had come true, and that Luck of some kind had struck the little
town by the big river. So, this trip, I stopped to make sure. It was a
beautiful town of six thousand people, and a railway junction, beside a
high-girdered iron bridge; there was a public garden with trees at the
station. A company of joyous men and women, whom that air and that
light, and their own goodwill, made our brothers and sisters, came along
in motors, and gave us such a day as never was.
'What about the Luck?' I asked.
'Heavens!' said one. 'Haven't you heard about our natural gas - the
greatest natural gas in the world? Oh, come and see!'
I was whirled off to a roundhouse full of engines and machinery-shops,
worked by natural gas which comes out of the earth, smelling slightly of
fried onions, at a pressure of six hundred pounds, and by valves and
taps is reduced to four pounds. There was Luck enough to make a
metropolis. Imagine a city's heating and light - to say nothing of
power - laid on at no greater expense than that of piping!
'Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?' I demanded.
'Who knows? We're only at the beginning. We'll show you a brick-making
plant, out on the prairie, run by gas. But just now we want to show you
one of our pet farms.'
Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over roads any width you please,
and up on to what looked like the High Veldt itself. A Major of the
Mounted Police, who had done a year at the (Boer) war, told us how the
ostrich-farm fencing and the little meercats sitting up and racing about
South Africa had made him homesick for the sight of the gophers by the
wayside, and the endless panels of wire fencing along which we rushed.
(The Prairie has nothing to learn from the Veldt about fencing, or
tricky gates.)
'After all,' said the Major, 'there's no country to touch this. I've had
thirty years of it - from one end to the other.'
Then they pointed out all the quarters of the horizon - say, fifty miles
wherever you turned - and gave them names.
The show farmer had taken his folk to church, but we friendly slipped
through his gates and reached the silent, spick-and-span house, with its
trim barn, and a vast mound of copper-coloured wheat, piled in the sun
between two mounds of golden chaff. Every one thumbed a sample of it and
passed judgment - it must have been worth a few hundred golden sovereigns
as it lay, out on the veldt - and we sat around, on the farm machinery,
and, in the hush that a shut-up house always imposes, we seemed to hear
the lavish earth getting ready for new harvests. There was no true wind,
but a push, as it were, of the whole crystal atmosphere.
'Now for the brickfield!' they cried. It was many miles off. The road
fed by a never-to-be-forgotten drop, to a river broad as the Orange at
Norval's Pont, rustling between mud hills. An old Scotchman, in the very
likeness of Charon, with big hip boots, controlled a pontoon, which
sagged back and forth by current on a wire rope. The reckless motors
bumped on to this ferry through a foot of water, and Charon, who never
relaxed, bore us statelily across the dark, broad river to the further
bank, where we all turned to look at the lucky little town, and discuss
its possibilities.
'I think you can see it best from here,' said one.
'No, from here,' said another, and their voices softened on the very
name of it.
Then for an hour we raced over true prairie, great yellow-green plains
crossed by old buffalo trails, which do not improve motor springs, till
a single chimney broke the horizon like a mast at sea; and thereby were
more light-hearted men and women, a shed and a tent or two for workmen,
the ribs and frames of the brick-making mechanism, a fifteen foot square
shaft sunk, sixty foot down to the clay, and, stark and black, the pipe
of a natural-gas well. The rest was Prairie - the mere curve of the
earth - with little grey birds calling.
I thought it could not have been simpler, more audacious or more
impressive, till I saw some women in pretty frocks go up and peer at the
hissing gas-valves.
'We fancied that it might amuse you,' said all those merry people, and
between laughter and digressions they talked over projects for building,
first their own, and next other cities, in brick of all sorts; giving
figures of output and expenses of plant that made one gasp. To the eye
the affair was no more than a novel or delicious picnic. What it
actually meant was a committee to change the material of civilisation
for a hundred miles around. I felt as though I were assisting at the
planning of Nineveh; and whatever of good comes to the little town that
was born lucky I shall always claim a share.
But there is no space to tell how we fed, with a prairie appetite, in
the men's quarters, on a meal prepared by an artist; how we raced home
at speeds no child could ever hear of, and no grown-up should attempt;
how the motors squattered at the ford, and took pot-shots at the pontoon
till even Charon smiled; how great horses hauled the motors up the
gravelly bank into the town; how there we met people in their Sunday
best, walking and driving, and pulled ourselves together, and looked
virtuous; and how the merry company suddenly and quietly evanished
because they thought that their guests might be tired.
